Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday December 03, 2013 @11:09PM
from the onward-and-upward dept.

MojoKid writes "There's a great deal riding on the launch of AMD's next-generation Kaveri APU. The new chip will be the first processor from AMD to incorporate significant architectural changes to the Bulldozer core AMD launched two years ago and the first chip to use a graphics core derived from AMD's GCN (Graphics Core Next) architecture. A strong Kaveri launch could give AMD back some momentum in the enthusiast business. Details are emerging that point to a Kaveri APU that's coming in hot — possibly a little hotter than some of us anticipated. Kaveri's Steamroller CPU core separates some of the core functions that Bulldozer unified and should substantially improve the chip's front-end execution. Unlike Piledriver, which could only decode four instructions per module per cycle (and topped out at eight instructions for a quad-core APU), Steamroller can decode four instructions per core or 16 instructions per quad-core module. The A10-7850K will offer a 512-core GPU while the A10-7700K will be a 384-core part. Again, GPU clock speeds have come down, from 844MHz on the A10-6800K to 720MHz on the new A10-7850K but should be offset by the gains from moving to AMD's GCN architecture."

I run a core 2 duo on a motherboard 8 years old, with a gtx460 (it was originally with an 8800GT, which I pensioned off) and I will guarantee you my PC outperforms most PCs sold today, gaming-wise.

The Core2Duo was a good chip for its time, but current Intels outperform it by a wide margin. I'm pretty sure that even current AMDs beat it, despite their Bulldozer mis-design. Likewise, the GTX460 will be beaten by modern cards.

If you are talking about Intel PCs that use only integrated graphics, your claim might be true. But gamers usually understand that they need a discrete GPU;-)

Actually the Phenom II is a step up and an AthlonFX64 would be the AMD equivalent of your setup. Fine for light work but I would not want to purchase one today if needing a new computer unless I am broke and then I would buy it at Salvation Army used and just rewipe it.

Only games, compiling, and HD video editing require anything newer than a 2006 era machine which is why XP just wont die already! First it was multitasking you need a $3000 machine

Laptops? While I'd love to see a nice, low cost CPU/GPU combo that can hang with my (rather meager) Athlon X2 6000+ and GT 240, I'm still running pretty low end gear. If this is targeted at enthusiasts they're just going to replace it with a card...

AMD is creaming Intel in this area. Intel's graphics SUCK. They are as fast as 2006 era graphics and makes game developers pull their hair out and scream more than web developers with IE 6 as they need many work arounds with such poor performance.

The new 5000 series is only 5 years obsolete from what I hear. But Intel likes it this way as they want people to think it is 1995 all over again and buy beefy over priced cpus for better fps instead of upgrading a video card.

"Thanks to the fast eDRAM memory, the average performance of the Iris Pro is only about 15 percent behind the dedicated mid-range cards GeForce GT 650M and GT 750M. This makes the Iris Pro even faster than AMDs Radeon HD 8650G and the fastest integrated GPU of 2013. Therefore, many current games can be played fluently in medium or high detail settings and a resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels. In some older or less demanding titels like Diablo III or Fifa 2013, even higher resolutions or quality settings may be possible."

Iris Pro is something I have never seen in any mainstream laptop, and once it comes out in say a Dell or Samsung, that's gonna cost an arm and leg because Intel's high end GPUs come with high-end CPU combos )like the i7). The great thing about AMD's A10+ HD 8650G combo is that you can buy a $600 HP or Lenovo with it today to get about the same level of gaming performance. If Kaveri improves upon the A10 without increasing the price or power consumption, it will be a winner as far as budget gaming on laptop

Laptops? While I'd love to see a nice, low cost CPU/GPU combo that can hang with my (rather meager) Athlon X2 6000+ and GT 240, I'm still running pretty low end gear. If this is targeted at enthusiasts they're just going to replace it with a card...

Basically it's a CPU + GPU bundle that only takes up the size of the CPU. It's not meant for the hardcore gamers, just pragmatists who are looking for value and simplicity. Like every company, AMD has a product lineup -- different products are marketed in different ways (although AMD is not always as clear about the matter as it could be). For the price, these chips are usually pretty good values.

You are all over the place. You wonder what the GPU is for, then state that you actually will love this very product because its a low cost CPU/GPU combo, but then specifically name your "rather meager" rig that is even slower than the last generation of APU's in both CPU and GPU performance (ie, your rig is the thing that cannot hang), and finish the whole thing off hypothesizing that AMD might in fact be targeting "enthusiasts."

I believe if you have a discrete GPU based on the same architecture (GCN in this case), you can use both simultaneously for a small speed boost, or switch between them depending on load (so your 250W video card doesn't need to spin its fans up just to render the desktop).

There's also some consideration for using the integrated GPU for lower-latency GPGPU stuff while using the discrete GPU for rendering. I don't think that's actually used in anything yet, but I'm not actually using an APU in any of my machin

Exactly. That's why the big deal with Intel's Haswell was basically "consumes a lot less power", the rest was incremental and a few added instructions for the future. AMD seems to have the same tech analysts as Netcraft crying "The Desktop is dying, the desktop is dying!"

If you play to own anything that is a desktop, then anything like this from AMD or Intel, that can be replaced with something that is TWICE is fast using the cheapest 50$ dedicated video card, makes the advances absolutely meaningless.

I kind of wonder about this too. No matter how low-end your desktop system is, as long as you have a modern CPU, even in say Celeron range, you can always pop into it a 100 dollar ATI video card (check Tom's hardware's latest recommendations) and it should run circles around those AMD APU's with integrated graphics. Now AMD is supposedly shooting at the market for these $100 video cards. That is, they seem to imply that this APU will make cheap video cards unnecessary. It will certainly be interesting to lo

I think that Kaveri would become a very compelling choice for htpc and even gaming. You could easily build an entry level steam machine with this and because there is no discrete GPU, you could do a really small form factor with good airflow.

An audio server that uses true audio is another intriguing option.

There are even fanless cabinets that will take up to 95 watt CPUs like this one.

"I also have a noob question. Can kaveri or even the existing a10 chips be used in crossfire mode? Meaning integrated graphics crossfired with a discrete GPU. Does it even make sense to do something like this? For example, it could be a good upgrade path."

I think that Kaveri would become a very compelling choice for htpc and even gaming. You could easily build an entry level steam machine with this and because there is no discrete GPU, you could do a really small form factor with good airflow.

An audio server that uses true audio is another intriguing option.

There are even fanless cabinets that will take up to 95 watt CPUs like this one.

These are fully programmable GPUs that support preemptive multitasking, protected mode memory-addressing, can even cause page faults to use virtual memory transparently with the OS. Now for the good part. Fully C and C++ compliant. If you can write OpenCL in C or C++, then you can write it on these GPUs.

It will be much harder to have the GPU cache coherent with the CPU if that "shit" is stripped out. It is this advance far more than anything else which makes this architecture hold promise. There's now some crazy amount of arithmetic performance available (far, far more than even the most expensive Intel chips) but without the usual high latency (and pain in the ass) trip to and grom a graphics card.

That "shit" will make the GPU suitable for a substantially broader range of problems s

To be fair, most of the PC market is budget. We the enthusiasts are the minority. This thing will probably play Starcraft 2, Crysis 3, Battlefield Whatever, BioShock Infinite Squared, etc... well enough for someone who doesn't mind 35 fps on an HD monitor. If you want 90 fps on a 4K monitor, you'll have to move up to Core i5 + mid level or better discrete graphics card.

I know I am minority, but it's cool to have a mid-level gaming capability on portables and not having to pay for it arm and leg. On the desktops.. I agree. The market for people who insist on gaming on a budget PC but refuse to put in at least a $100-120 video card is kind of small.

Kavari looks good for a budget gaming PC, but I think they are being a bit optimistic about the "dual graphics" feature. This is where you pair the iGPU with a dGPU, to get better performance. AMD has never been able to get this feature to work properly. All it does is create "runt" frames, which makes the FPS look higher, but without giving any visual improvement.

Kaveri should be properly compared to the chips in the PS4 and Xbone. As such, it can be said that Kaveri is significantly poorer than either.

-Kaveri is shader (graphics) weak compared to the Xbone, which itself is VERY weak compared to the PS4.-Kaveri should be roughly CPU equivalent (multi-threaded) to the CPU power of eother console-Kaveri is memory bandwidth weak compared to the Xbone, which itself is VERY bandwidth weak compared to the PS4-Kaveri is a generation ahead of the Xbone in HSA/hUMA concepts,

- Single-thread performance matters much more than multi-thread performance, and Kaveri has almost twice the single-thread performance of the Xbone and PS4 chips.

- Memory bandwidth is expensive. You either need wide and expensive bus, or expensive low-capasity graphics DRAM which need soldering, and means you are limited to 4 GiB of memory(with the highest capasity GDDR chips out there), with zero possibility of late upgrading it, or both(and MAYBE get 8 giB of soldered memory). Though there has been rumour

- Memory bandwidth is expensive. You either need wide and expensive bus, or expensive low-capasity graphics DRAM which need soldering, and means you are limited to 4 GiB of memory(with the highest capasity GDDR chips out there), with zero possibility of late upgrading it, or both(and MAYBE get 8 giB of soldered memory). Though there has been rumours that Kaveri might support GDDR5, for configurations with only 4 GiB of soldered memory.

In general (not necessarily relating to Kaveri as-is) 8 giB of fast, soldered memory as in the PS4 would make sense for a PC.

The current APUs are seriously bandwidth starved. In reviews where a Phenom II with a discrete graphics card is pitted against an APU with similar clock speed and number of graphics cores, the Phenom II usually wins (except benchmarks that don't use the GPU much). Overclocking the memory helps the APU some, which is further evidence.

In reviews where a Phenom II with a discrete graphics card is pitted against an APU with similar clock speed and number of graphics cores, the Phenom II usually wins... looking back on my last three computer purchases, I always ended up doing a complete update instead of adding RAM to the existing PC. Because the CPU and GPU were also obsolete...

Because my computer is a Phenom II, this might be the first time I add RAM to an existing PC.

APUs are only bandwidth starved when working with large datasets. There is a huge class of work-loads that are small amounts of data but require a lot of processing. In these cases, memory bandwidth isn't the limiting factor in any way. In many of these cases, it's faster to process the data on a 80GFlops CPU than to offload to a 3TFlops discreet GPU. Now we have a 900TFlop GPU that is only a few nanoseconds away from the CPU instead of tens of microseconds.

I could be wrong, but it had little to do with AMD and more to do with MS specifications.

The only difference between the graphic cores on the Xbox One and PS4 is that the PS4 uses newer DDR5 memory, while the xbox DDR3. Xbox tried to compensate for the slower memory by adding additional cache on die, however this takes up physical real estate, which forced them to use a couple less cores (in exchange for faster memory handling). To simply say one is faster/better than the other is a bit misleading.

This is the chip that unites the CPU and GPU into one programing model with unified memory addressing. Heterogeneous System Architecture(HSA) and Heterogeneous Uniform Memory Access(HUMA) are the nice buzzword acronyms that AMD came up with but it basically removes the latency from accessing GPU resources and makes memory sharing between the CPU cores and GPU cores copy free. You can now dispatch instructions to the GPU cores almost as easily and as quickly as you do to the basic ALU/FPU/SSE units of the CPU.

The thing I hope to see explored is using such a chip with discrete graphics. The ability for the on-chip GPU to access the same memory will allow some things to be optimised (but possibly not all graphics). I imagine in future we'll see a repeat of what happened with FPU coprocessors in the late 80s onwards: (this is a rough picture, and you are advised to look up the precise details if you're interested)

1. The 386 had a discrete FPU, called the 3872. The 486 integrated the FPU, and all subsequ

The x86 external FPU started with the Intel 8087 [wikipedia.org] which was launched during 1980. The 8087 was the FPU for the 8086, the first generation of x86. The 80286 followed the same logic using an external FPU, 80287.

The 386 was the first to integrate the FPU onto the CPU die in the DX line of 386's. The 386SX was a 386 without the FPU which depending on the computer/motherboard could be upgraded with a 387 coprocessor.

Your history is rather off. The 386 never had an integrated FPU. 386 DX had a 32-bit bus. The 386 SX had a 16-bit bus for cost saving measures. The 486 DX was the one with the integrated FPU, and that was the first to include the FPU by default. The 486 SX had the FPU fused off.

Ah shit, you're right. I forgot that the 386 didn't have an FPU and was confused by the 486SX/DX nomenclature.

Thinking back my father had two 386's at work. One a 386DX was for CAD and now that I think of it, it had a Cyrix "Fast Math" 387 FPU. Interesting thing was it had a slot which was two 8 bit ISA slots end-to-end that was a 32 bit expansion slot. Wasn't populated but was interesting. He also had a 386SX which was used for word processing and accounting/payroll. Later on we had two 486's.

The current Richland APUs have a native memory controller that runs at 1866MHz so if you put in 9-10-9 RAM of that speed and overclock it a hair, you get graphics performance that ranks at a 6.9-7.0 in the WEI in Win7. REmember, you have to jack up the memory speed since the GPU inside the CPU is using system memory instead of GDDR5. That rating is medium speed for games. So that's around $139 for the top of the line chip and $75 for the RAM.

I really like AMD (in fact, all my computers since 1999 -- except for an old iMac -- have been AMD-based), but I really, really wish I could get a (socketed, not embedded) AMD APU with less than 65W TDP (ideally, it should be something like 10-30W).

I hate that when I ask people in forums "what's the lowest power consumption solution for MythTV with commercial detection and/or MP4 reencoding?" the answer is "buy Intel."

You're missing three important factors. One is that both brands downclock significantly when not in use so they're a lot closer in real world usage than you think on power consumption. Maximum TDP is just that, a maximum. That's why not many servers have AMD chips but as for desktops running normal tasks like web browsing, the CPU is reduced to a lower power state over 90% of the time.

Secondly, if it's not a laptop not many people really care. DVRs sort of make sense because of the actual heat though.

Back in the real world, if what you're saying is true, AMD woudln't be forced to sell these chips at bargain basement prices. I'm thinking of using one to replace my old Athlon X2 system, but only because it's cheap.

I don't care about principle or theory. They can have 12 cores for all I care. You know why HP has 30+% of the market? Because they're the cheapest because they undercut everyone. That's what consumers buy. If AMD can get X performance for Y price and Intel can't beat them, that's who everyone will buy.
Plus, the i5 is a quad core. The FX6300 gets a passmark rating of around 6400. The i5-3450 gets around 6450 so they're basically the same speed.
The FX is $119 and the i5 is $190.
The FX has a max TDP

I am typing this on a Phenom II now. Not a bad chip at the time several years ago as that could hold a candle to the i5s and i7s with just a 10% performance decrease but was less than half the price and had virtualization support for VMWare and 6 cores. I run VMWare and several apps at once so it was a reasonable compromise for me and budget friendly.

But today I would not buy an AMD chip:-(

I would buy a GPU chip which is about it as those are very competitive. I wish AMD w

I plan on buying AMD anyway, despite its inferiority, because I think the competition is good for everyone.

Eventually, maybe 5, 10, or 15 years out, I expect Intel's competition to be high end ARM chips. But for now, AMD is it. If we the consumers let AMD fold, we had better be satisfied with buying used desktop processors because I fully expect new ones to double in price per performance compared to what they are today, just because nothing will be available as an alternative.

I don't think x86 is here to stay forever. What are some of the most popular video games in the world: Candy Crush Saga (or whatever it's called), Angry Birds, Draw Something, Cut the Rope, Minecraft. Smart phone and tablet sales keep climbing and desktop and laptop sales are stagnant.

I don't expect Android to dominate consumer operating systems next year, or five years from now. But I can readily believe that 15 years from now Microsoft consumer operating systems will be in a decline, and so w

My goal was a 5 year plan so in 2015 is when I will upgrade. I got an SSD, ATI 7850, and 16 gigs of higher speed ram. Yes my processor is 2.6 ghz but that is the only part left and the T edition is a little bit faster.

In the old days I would upgrade at 100% performance increase. Today it is I/O. I am sure Tom Raider would run fine under medium to high on it if I disable an effect or 2. No biggie for the extra cost.

What is your way of measuring speed that's superior than the rest of the internet then? The FX6300 ties or beats it in every other category and test style imaginable as well.
You're also forgetting that processors are practically a non-issue these days. If you had an i7 system with a 1TB drive and an Athlon X2 AM3 Regor 260 system with an SSD, the AMD system would feel faster doing just about anything realistic like web browsing and opening software. Intel fanboys are just buying high performance chips t

Can some of these cores work on game AI whilst others handle graphics, or can they only work on one task all at once? Could they do game AI at all? And can programmers program for gpu cores cross-platform or is it still one brand at a time?

I was doing some reading on Mantle, and there's some interesting things I noted. One of the things about Mantle is you can create "task" queues. You register a queue with some consumer, be that the CPU or a GPU. Registering the queue is a system call, but the queue itself is in user land. Each task is a data structure that contains a few things, several of them were stuff that I was less interested in, but a few stood out. One was a pointer to a function and another was a pointer to some data.

For several years now, AMD is using islands names [wikipedia.org] for the internal GPU names (being the type/location of island used to group families) and river names [wikipedia.org] for the CPUs/APUs. Kaveri [wikipedia.org] is a river in India... that just by luck is also a word in Polish and Scandinavia.

Dunno about you, but I ain't gonna be excited by AMD's offerings anymore, after what they dished to us on their Bulldozer roll out

For more than a year before Bulldozer came into being they told us that the Bulldozer gonna be revolutionary - they hyped the Bulldozer so much that many forums were filled with people just couldn't wait to get their hands on it

This is starting to get ancient history but as I remember it Intel was pushing the PIII hard right up until the launch of PIV, they were never in the "please hold out a little longer, please don't buy an AMD our PIV is going to be twice as fast and give free blowjobs" mode. Of course they did keep pushing it after everyone knew it was a dud, after all that's what they had to sell much like AMD now. It's pre-launch when all you get are "leaks" that are really plants, PR statements and astroturf/fanboy hype b

So did you stop believing in Intel after their bugged Pentiums rolled off the line? ARM only from now on, until they screw something up?

Just because a company has a product that flopped doesn't mean they won't ever produce anything good again. While it's fine to not be excited until it's actually hit shelves, writing them off for the end of time seems a bit premature.

You wrote : Dunno about you, but I ain't gonna be excited by AMD's offerings anymore, and some other bumpf.

How exactly were you replying to the AC?

I know policy is to stick your comment as high as possible, if possible..... but you replied to someone who said "They love to gag on Polish sausages". You must have know that you weren't actually replying to them.